Last October I had the privilege to visit the K2 Insiders conference. We all got to see a preview of K2’s new 4.5 release. Now (finally!) a targeted beta is available for selected partners, customers and insiders. This blog post will focus on Inline functions, a new feature of the 4.5 release which will be available for K2 blackpoint 4.5 and K2 blackpearl 4.5. The new release also features improvements to the designers, as you can read in Jey’s blogpost.
After the post from day 1, the post of day 2 couldn’t really be left behind. So here’s my take on the sessions I went to see.
SharePoint Connection NL 2010
MSOL06: Nintex Workflow 2010: Extending 2010-Era SharePoint Workflow to End User and Enterprise Needs Alike by Mike Fitzmaurize As a K2 insider it seemed weird going to the Nintex session, but I went to see what they have to offer as it is always good to keep an open mind.
On the 18th of January, Microsoft Events organized a SharePoint Connection in the Amsterdam RAI. In this blog post I’ll post on the sessions I went to see. These are my notes and not a full report on the sessions.
Keynote by Matthijs Hoekstra and Mike Fitzmaurice The keynote started with the nice promotional video that was also shown at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas back in October. It’s a nice movie with lots of fast moving images and music, good to wake up and get you in a good mood.
I started running windows 7 a few weeks ago. I (as everybody does) like it a lot. I disliked the new start-bar and changed it back to the old behavior, simply because i don’t want to click twice to open the correct explorer window.
The other part that I’ve changed is the size of the borders on windows. To do that:
Go to Personalize by right clicking on your desktop. In the Personalize screen, select Window Color In the screen that pops up, select “Advanced appearance settings” Now you’ll get the normal screen you’re used to from XP and earlier.
At the K2 conference, we also got information on what K2 will do with SharePoint 2010. As you can see in this post, K2 is working hard to enhance the new functionality of the Office 2010 platform. Personally, i really like the integration with the office applications itself as lots of clients actually don’t want to leave outlook.
Apart from this new functionality, K2 will also support the current functionality in SP2010, which we saw a demo of at the conference.
K2 Insider Conference Last weekend was the K2 insider Conference in Las Vegas. They neatly planned it just before the SharePoint Conference to make it more easy for us to come over. This post will not cover a lot of info that’s been said at the conference, some of it is even under NDA, so I’m simply not allowed to blog about, which is a shame, as I can’t wait to get all those new bits!
The K2 BlackPearl platform as it stands today is a large platform with a lot of out of the box functionality. When using out of the box products, I always fear that it might be too limited. When doing K2 projects I sometimes hit those boundaries, but I’m always able to use one of K2’s extension options to help me out. A custom action for the Event Bus (what this blog post is about) is just one of the possibilities.
In our current project there are 18 processes with each at least 4 client events. There are even processes with 8 or 12 client events. We also have 1 webpart that handles all the client events. In the beginning we decide on the URL passing a parameter to allow the webpart to render correctly. The basis of that decision has (of course) changed and the querystring isn’t used anymore.
This also means, that querystring only contains the SerialNumber.
Just a quick update on BlackPoint. Currently you can download it from http://portal.k2workflow.com if you purchased it or if you are a K2 partner….
Happy 1234567890 day!
Wonder what it’s about? Check out these:
http://www.1234567890day.com/
http://www.brokenwire.net/bw/Various/106/today-is-special
http://blog.jdlh.com/en/2009/02/12/1234567890_day/
http://coolepochcountdown.com/